As a great fan of the Raptor series drives, what I want from WD is the same concept in SSD: the top performance and super reliability it is. The down side of course in a VelociRaptor is its relative price - and, as expensive as SSDs still are, a comparable price for an SSD "VelociRaptor" would be extreme.

Still, it's what I want, and I could certainly see me building a high-end system using smaller capacity WD SSD "Raptors" in Raid 0 for that extreme performance goofy people like me want to have. If I get an extra few grand handed to me, I would use larger drives, of course.

Anyhoo, this drive is not what I want to see from WD (unless of course it really does kick reliability butt over its competitors). Hopefully by the time I build another high-end rig (just built one so it will be awhile, likely) WD will have what I want (or someone), a SSD successor to VelociRaptor mechanical hard drives. Reply

Anand mentioned some possible convergence between magnetic and solid state drive firmware development. Could this mean the mythical hybrid drive is down the road somewhere? With single spindles holding in excess of 300 GB and SSDs not even filling the 2.5" form factor, isn't there room for both? If not both storage types in one drive then maybe both storage types in one drive slot? Then you could have the boot drive be the super fast SSD and the advantage of cheaper, higher-capacity storage of a single-spindle magnetic drive in a single laptop. I think this dual-drive approach could be a better solution than the hybrid drive until caching in drive controllers becomes smarter. Reply

These drives clearly don't support NCQ, as IOPS don't scale with QD.
The rating of 5000 IOPS is about the same as the rating of a single NAND TSOP. You can literaly get the same random IOPS performance from a thumbnail USB drive. Reply

Oh well nothing to see here either. I dont see how they can justify the price. A SSD with a PCB and some chips should be cheaper to make than a mechanical hard drive with moving metal parts. Fair enough to pay a little extra for new tech but this is ridiculous. Reply

I just wanted to comment on your closing remarks: "It just strikes me as odd for hard drive manufacturers with decades of experience in firmware development and data access patterns, to not come out of the gates swinging."

I'm sure you realize that the two technologies are almost completely different. Sure they have common components and similar storage logistics, but WD made it's way on the quality of the physical aspect and head speeds of hard disks.

The comparison is almost the same as how floppy disks have been phased out by thumb drives, or film cameras being replaced with digital cameras. We didn't see those companies that excelled in the in the first generation of their technology come out swinging, did we? Verbatim and Kodak are still struggling.

What's more surprising is not seeing a company with a big wallet to come out aiming for the fences. That's what I'd like to see, just like Intel.

IF everything stayed the same than yes the point would be moot but sadly when acquisition happens changes are always in effect and mostly for the bad reasons. You can acquire the best SSD house in the world and bring it into your team with little experience in it and have them run it. Give it a few days and that "best" becomes WTF, guarantee. Reply

Except, SiliconSystems is really a mock company and I use that term loosely. Even if you say they focused on CF, although it is more similar to SSD NAND, as a storage product it is still significantly different. I would say, though, that the combination of WDs current storage management, combined with some experience with the NAND controllers should have put out something better than this WD SSD.

Still, WD acquired Silicon Systems in March of last year and (even then) I thought SS was an inexperienced company. They put out Enterprise/OEM products, that didn't really deal with speed, but more with reliability; more specifically, being able to recover from unforeseen power downs, data errors, etc. While that is very important, SSDs are supposed to provide speed and that's not something SS is known for.

So, yes, I still stand by my statement. Still different technologies and a hard transition.

A comprehensive/insightful article, as always. I would have a couple of remarks about the graphs though: the low values are printed over the drive names and the the WD drive is listed as JM618.

I see the TRIM support is given the due attention, but there are quiet a few users that don't benefit from it (e.g. using Windows XP, TrueCrypt). Would it be too much trouble to ask for some tests with drive full/some percent free and TRIM disabled?

Did the WD experienced any significant (read abysmal) drop in write performance after some use (such as HD Tune Pro benchmarks at Legit Reviews and StorageReview)? Reply

I've heard that CCleaner's "wipe" function can work as a manual TRIM, and restore performance to OS's that don't support TRIM. I will test this firsthand soon, as I got in on the Intel 80GB G1 deal for $149, which doesn't have TRIM. Reply

This drive is a piece of junk. Seriously. It's grade A crap. Anand is being way too kind to it. It gets trounced by every other SSD sans the super cheap, nerfed Intel 40GB one, and yet asks us to pay with an arm and a leg? Even if this thing is at half it's price, it'd still be a horrible mistake of a buy.

And I see people going on about how great it is because it's Western Digital?

It seems JMicron still can't make a good controller to save its life (it's all that DDR2 memory keeping it afloat!). Though the good news is it's getting better. I guess that's akin to telling a quadriplegic they are improving at wiggling their eyebrows. Reply

I agree... this drive is utter crap.
it is the most expensive by far, and it is the lowest performing across the board with the exception of crippled drive like gen 1 jmicron and crippled 40GB intel V.
they tout "reliability" and "compatibility", but that is just BS. the established drives have already solved all their compatibility and reliability issues. If you buy a current indilinx drive it isn't gonna have any more problems, they were fixed already. This drive however, was never tested en masse by the public.

I honestly don't know what Anand has been smoking lately but there's quite more of us upset at these types of seemingly bias reviews. Maybe him and his team needs to learn how to properly test and write reports again. Shrug. Disgraceful and shameful imo. Reply

I'm actually not glad that they are FINALLY trying to jump on the bandwagon. I think WD makes the best overall consumer drives and I've run them exclusively (on/off) for years... But here's where I differ.

As many of you know, I've been ranting ad raving on here about metered-technology well guess what? WD finally proves my diatribes b/c they've ran out of ideas and cannot compete with their uber, overpriced/overrated drives, so what do they do? Have a board meeting with execs pulling their hair about "WTF are we going to do with this SSD crap?! They're killing our once herald Raptors and our metered-technology scheme. What are we going to counter with?!"

As much as I support WD, I'm glad these metered monoliths are facing the heat as they've been pushing junk releases to us for decades. I personally would like to see WD, Sea, Hit, Sam and the like to all fail and hard. All of the years of metered garbage put on for us to review and nitpick about unperceivable performance numbers... while getting charged 10-20-30% for performance advantages that are meaningless; clever marketing schemes and ploys to sell it. etc... The age of the mechanical rotating disk is coming to a close; I hope to see them go extinct!

The last thing I want to see is another huge conglomerate of metered-chicanery gobble up all these newly inspired innovators, just to yank back the reigns of the wild stallions that blaze a path to future innovation. Just to end up subjugated and attached to the old wooden-wheeled cart, overloaded with slow, underperforming, metered-feed to dump in the toughs of the consumer CATTLE.

I want these new innovators to stay FREE from large, slow and lumbering technology stalwarts like listed. These corps want to engulf and eventually assimilate these stallions into their cattle-carriage technologically metered assembly line... Just you watch, as soon as these little companies get swallowed up, all the constant and surging innovation will cease.

You see, a corporation is nothing merely but a giant blob/amoeba; sucking and absorbing anything and everything it comes in contact with, into its slovenly and molasses like body. They'll buy up OCZ and the like and turn them into another pet project to mooch off of and soon another huge boardroom will be filled with greedy executives scheming and plotting on how to meter out even more crap upgrades. "Oh lets see if we can split these SLC to LCs (made up for effect) and come out with a new "green LC" line. We'll justify slow and underperforming drives as "acceptable" b/c they are saving a minuscule amount of energy you could by just turning a light bulb/TV off/unplugging power bricks etc.

As much as I like WD, Hitch, Sea etc... these places are evil, overtly greedy and frankly a poor model of technological innovators (WD being the top of out them). They'll discover a new breakthrough in the lab, cover it up, then the tech and marketing board meet up and try to chop up said innovation into 3-4-5-6; or 10 diff product lines, with tailore-specific marketing to sell to the cattle. This type of business model HAS TO GO! *You guys need to stop supporting this model* if you want them to actually start innovating Vs pretending.

Why are there enterprise drives ranging from 300-600GB, 15Krpm out? What about 10Krpm drives with the same capacity? What do we, the desktop cattle receive over the same years? Some (comparatively) slow 10Krpm, tiny 36,74.... then 150, then 300GB Raptors (Oh and the PRICE!)? WHY did the public not receive the next major spindle speed upgrade like enterprise users did? 5400 ---- 7200... STOP! Now come out with a "special" 10krpm, small capacity, uber expensive boot/OS drive, give it a catchy name (I wonder how many boardroom hours were billing conceiving this new ploy) and see if it sells... It sure did! What about the rest of the public? No 10Krpm upgrade for us, unless you wanna drop $100-200 more for 500% less capacity on a Raptor… HOGWASH! They over extended their metering plan and SSDs BLEW IT UP in their loser, lame faces. Jokes on you WD!

Now all of a sudden before they could even contemplate releasing a standardized 10Krpm for the desktop consumer... SSDs jump the gun and completely rule out this metered strategy as MOOT! HAHA those poor raptors are near worthless now and will soon be dumped on ebay for pennies on the dollar b/c the GIG IS UP! The Raptor hold-out, con-game iS FINALLY BROKEN! Farwell rape-tor, no more price premium for YOU!

This to me paints a clear portrait of the chicanery and metered non-sense that’s been covered up and going on for decades; SSD releases have deciphered this flaw in the marketing con-game… GOOD RIDDANCE! Soon, one day… there’ll BE no more lag, and access times (meaningful), and spinning garbage to suddenly fail on your w/o SMART warning etc… GOOD BY mechanical junk…. And to think, we all could have had this technology and watched it long surpass the 2TB mark of mech drives today, IF this metered ploy had not been allowed to be in place for so long. Enthusiasts have been hooking up CF adaptors and such for years before SSDs. They were the pioneers of said solid-state… What a wonderful break though era; again, I hope to high hell OCZ and the like, out compete the mech-marketers, completely take over the their market and keep WD, Sea, Hit, Sam and the rest of the con-artists OUT… Stick to spinning disks and actuator science LAMES!

PS- And of course I HAVE to call out Anand (no offense, just business) staff for the constant wrist slapping “conclusions” that we’re all so used to… Excuses, apologies and semantic games, used to run around the facts of this obviously evident shill-game? YOU guys work in the business, just like I do; I KNOW you’ve long known this crap… but to make a buck ya gotta be quiet about it or if ya want to keep getting free Golden-samples to review… better hush-hush on the shitty products we’re left to purchase from a sub-par, and inconclusive review. How many times has a review site built up a nice machine, only for use to mimic the same build and get nothing near the results you attain? GOLDEN-SAMPLES that’s why; the best that the factory can produce, given you to review and speculate on; thus we go out from all the built up hype, only to get avg to slightly above avg performance… Who’s to blame, nobody just a few writers/bloggers shrugged their shoulders as if they don’t know the game… Get outta here, many of us know about golden-samples and the like… If a product doesn’t finish a test or meet the requirements like it’s competition in the line up… DID NOT FINISH, DNF should be awarded and NO excuses offered, other than it didn’t work like the rest… Then again…*sigh* you run a business, and what’s good for business, isn’t so much for the consumer; Grow some spine guys… Seesh.

Its rather shocking and yet understandable that the HDD companies of Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba (anyone else?) ignored the coming of SSDs. Instead have little tiny companies coming out with products and learning the tech.

I guess they can do the wait-and see and let those smaller companies suffer the birthing pains of a new tech... then buy them out or reverse engineer the tech.

So, WD and Seagate both buy out a tech, spend many months learning how it works and then come out with product that is pretty much based on what is out on the market now... how many millions were spent?

I'm not impressed with WD's performance or its price... this blue drive is constantly on the bottom end of things. Yes there are problematic drives - mostly in the past. And as shown with a little bit of research on the consumer end, they know what to avoid... like certain OCZ and Kingston models, Corsair. That same bit of research will show that the current blue-SSD drives are not worth buying.

In the end with my limited SSD experience, I have gone with intel with their X25-G2 drives. I'm not an intel fan (their business practices), nor an AMD fan-boy as I own computers with both types of CPUs. But I bought their drives because of the tools, support and overall-performance of their drives. Yes, they are NOT the fastest seq. R/W drives on the market... but they are among the fastest Random R/W and have a proven track record (not perfect). When you pickup an Intel or re-badged G2 drive, you know exactly what you're getting. I've bought intel and A-Data's G2 (intel) drives, same firmware... and A-Data was $70 cheaper than intel's sticker.

With OCZ, theres confusion of what drive is what. 4~6 different versions of a 64 or 128GB drives. etailer A has some, but maybe not the others... some drives support trim, some don't. I'm glad OCZ is at least coming out with a lot of products, but there is too much gray area... new models (or discontinued) every 3~4 months it seems.

The day will come when we, the consumer can go to a store (or website) and have a dozen good drives to choose from that are fast, reliable and low-cost. For desktop users, I think the hybrid setup works best for costs (SSD boot & progs, HDD for data).. but todays $100 32~40GB drives tend to be slow crippled versions of faster drives. About 5 years ago a 60GB 2.5" HDD was $200. Today, a 640GB 2.5" HDD goes for $100 ($50 for 250GB).

So yeah, in less than 2 years... $100 should get you a 128~160GB SSD with SATA3/6GBs interface and able to pump at least 450MB/s into your computer and have an easy 5year 7-day usage life span.

My experience with intel-X25s. Amazing... Windows7, fully loaded with apps and such... boots in about 10seconds (after POST). A fast HDD would boot Win7 in about 35~40 seconds. The SSD & computer are not SATA 3... :(

You should add a couple spaces to the end of the names of the drives that you expect to have low performance (like the HDDs). Then in your graphs when the benchmark text collides with the drive name text, it will be spaces colliding with the numbers, and the numbers will be readable.
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I'm glad to see WD entering this market. People need to realize that eventually, SSD will become commoditized (but it won't ever going to be as cheap as mechanical drives!), and that the NAND chips (or whatever flash chips in them) will also be commoditized.

Commodity is not important.

What is/will be important is the interface and the optimization of the SSD drives. WD has the best team and the best experience when it comes to interface. Makers like OCZ, Micron, and even the mighty Intel,... DO NOT have extensive experience when it comes to interface and optimization.

I predict that eventually, WD will become the dominant SSD maker for desktops, followed by Seagate. Intel will be there simply of its massive size. But smaller makes like OCZ, Supertalent... will go the way of the Dodo. Reply

The SSD team at Marvell came from the old Maxtor/Quantum hard drive team.

The SanDisk firmware team came from the Maxtor/Quantum/Seagate hard drive team.

The SandForce firmware VP came from SanDisk.

The Micron team came from Lexar.

There are plenty of veterans that can do SSD correctly, basically people who've done hard drive and some flash memory before. The biggest problem is the closeness to a FAB that build and design the NAND, so far WD doesn't have a fab, so they can't get their hands on the latest generation's nand chip problem.

"SSD will become commoditized (but it won't ever going to be as cheap as mechanical drives!)"

Yes they will... in a sense. The same way a Quad Core intel will never become as cheap as a $30 Celeron... or a X1900XTX a $500 card turning into a $100 card - as a $75 ATI 5570 is easily faster... something else will come out that is cheaper and faster.

The HD are hitting the limits of technology. Anything above 1TB are not as reliable as the smaller drives. The densities are too tight and eventually even the smaller drives will be using the same tech.. :( When 4GB drives come out... we'll be seeing even more failures and problems.

But with SSDs, everything is a matter of price today. Its not impossible to make a 2GB or 4GB SSD drive... but just cost.

When memory gets around 10ns and mass-production is up to much higher standards... then we'll see SDDs replace HDs. The benefits are very good, its still baby tech. Compare a 1986 HD to a 1990 HD, the 80s drives where every bad in reliability & speed. The 1990 drives don't even compare to the 1995 or 2000 drive.

The HDs will eventually go away to be replaced by cheaper and faster SSDs... it won't be next year... but I'd project that in 4~5 years, SSDs will make up 50% of the market... Most people just don't need 2~4TB drives. What is needed is a $75 120GB drive, $100~120 256GB and a $150~175 500GB drive. We're not even close to that today.

"What is/will be important is the interface and the optimization of the SSD drives"
The interface? Well that would be SATA, so that's a moot point. And optimization? That's exactly what they didn't do here. Also just because they know how to build a HDD that won't help them a bit for flash drives.. completely different technology.

The only thing they could have going for them would be more reliabilty and that's to be seen. At the moment these drives are too expensive and do not offer exceeding performance..

Also just because you're big doesn't mean you can't fail - wouldn't be a first in the industry.. Reply

I agree with the other poster. Samsung SLC SSD's that are the standard of the OEM industry are slower, more expensive, but more reliable than what an enthusiast would purchase. Pretty much the exact same description that these drives have. I'm betting this is primarily targeted at OEM's, and they are simply releasing them into the retail market to start a buzz before they release a WD Black SSD sometime in the future. If anything, this will double capacity of most OEM offerings for little to no increase in cost. With the crazy markup they're offering, they're also justifying their partners charging you an exorbitant amount of money to upgrade to SSD when configuring your system. Reply

I think WD's marketing/pricing department fell asleep back in 2008. What are they thinking? My only guess is they are banking on pre-built systems where companies such as Dell/HP/etc. already have agreements with them. They want the ram upgrade pricing for their SSD's. Otherwise, what a joke.

It's always nice to see another player enter the fray, but I'd hate to see these drives selling at MSRP as your only option when buying a system due to the weight WD has in the storage market. Reply

ughh... It nice to see new entries into the market, and continually improving performance, but prices are still outrageous! When will we get some relief with truly affordable SSDs? In my mind, I'd like to see 60gb drives in the >$100 rangs. Reply

I thought the mainstream OCZ 60GB is already going for ~130 after rebate?

Regardless, I have more faith in WD with its entry into SSD than any other manufacturer, except perhaps Intel. They are one of the most reliable HDD manu, and I don't see this changing with their SSD. Reply

Looks like yet another player in the SSD game, and despite the often cited `yay, more competition = lower prices` rhetoric, SSD`s are just not decreasing in price. Even at half the prices mentioned in the article, it wouldn`t be an improvement in value over what`s currently available... guess I`ll be sitting on the sidelines yet another year... Reply

Umm, you want competition so the MARKET could drive the prices down. Right now we have competition but the market isn't really there. As more and more consumers readily shell out hundreds of hard earn dollars for 60GB drives, the market will respond :) Reply

Not likeing Intel's business practices I tend to avoid their products which left OCZ which I haven't been impressed with ever. Now WD is here, an established and respected storage company. Might be time to switch to an SSD. =) Reply

However looking at performance, if speed is what counts, under certain circumstances these drives can perform 2 orders of magnitude or more faster than a traditional hdd. That's worth many times the cost difference to some people. Reply

>>However looking at performance, if speed is what counts, under certain circumstances these drives can perform 2 orders of magnitude or more faster than a traditional hdd. That's worth many times the cost difference to some people.

So basically, some people value that sometimes, in some circumstances, some SSD drives are faster... there is no useful information in your post... Reply

No, numbnuts. He was just being careful because depending on what performance figure you look at, they're simply faster and in other cases thes dance circles around a spindle drive. A decent or good SSD is always much faster than common desktop HDDs. But not everyone cares about that. Reply

At this point the Intel reliability is greater IMHO as it has already gone through testing by hundreds of thousands of users, if not millions.

And higher for mediocre performance is just not going to cut it. Maybe in six months when etailers are forced to sell them at 50% off to clear their inventory these will have an impact on pricing for most models. Reply

Kingston is not my favourite RAM maker, but their SSDs surely look a lot more solid than this WD. WD should wake up and put 5th gear in doing something more original.

and about SSDs ... I would say that in less than 10 Years, RAM will be dead and buried. All PCs will work directly from SSDs. Its nearly there, start your OS directly where you left it yesterday when you went to bed... Reply

at 50% they still wouldn't be competing with other similar offerings. The MSRP needs to be halved before getting a clearance price... that would be a decent deal today but it won't happen today. So not much point to the consumer from these drives. Decent test bed for the lazy WD I guess Reply

when I first started reading this, I thought the 256GB was $529, and I was still contemplating if it was worth it over the 160GB Intel at $429.... then I came ot the end and see that that was the 128GB price and the 256GB is $999? No frakking way WD, good luck selling even one of these... Reply

Nice to see WD enter the SSD market. I'd take the plunge on this if they can get the price a bit lower. That's what needs to happen for these drive to truely go mainstream, and it's the only thing holding me back. Reply

Did you look at overall performace (PCMark Vantage) even with this "horrific" performace it's almost 50% faster than one of the fastest mechanical drives out there. I HATE hard drive slowness on my systems, chugging just load load an application. It's 2010 for gods sake and were still using more or less 1960's tech. Reply

Sorry, but it's price. The technology WILL improve this year. Just based on what you've said, you're talking about the drives being 50% faster than 1960s tech. That's really not saying much as we all know the HD is the bottleneck.

I really would like to have a speedy SSD but I'm not going to spend that much on so little (space), even if I could afford them. Just wait a bit more this year and we'll see competition driving prices down :) Reply